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As they come off the assembly line, consumer goods might as well be lumps of coal. They are utterly inanimate, so much plastic, metal and/or fabric.
It's up to cultural creatives to breath life into them. Through a cunning process of meaning manufacture, designers and marketers make the inanimate animate. They make objects come to life.
This process raises lots of questions for the anthropologist. Here are one or two:
Are there any meanings in our culture that cannot be invested in goods? How big is the envelope of useable meanings? Is any meaning off limits? Is anything impossible because implausible? Are there, to use Austin's language, felicity conditions that must be satisfied?
Nike ACG Blazers offers us an interesting test. They are designed by Cassette Playa and launched during the “Future Primitive” runway show. The theme of the show was “urban shamanism.”
Cassette Playa’s creative director Carri Munden (pictured here with the ACG) offered this exegesis of the meanings of her design:
“Ancient Amazonian hunting rituals adapted by a gang of skaters in a post apocalyptic city”.
How wonderful.
References
See the entire Carri Munden Interview here.
Austin, J L. 1965. How to Do Things With Words. New York: Oxford University Press.
Florida, Richard. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.
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Grant
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I posted a piece on the Ford Fiesta Movement today on the Harvard Business Review blog. You will find it here.
Thanks again to Bud Caddell for the interview in December.
I am on the look out for more exemplars, people who now serve as Chief Culture Officers but are not (yet) identified as such. Please identify yourselves.
This post was lost thanks to the Network Solutions debacle last year. I am reposting it today, December 24, 2010.
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I never had a chance to meet Immanuel Kant (wrong century), but I think I got a glimpse of him on a B.C. Ferry.
We were travelling from Vancouver to Victoria, my parents, my sisters and me. The Ferry is not a fun ride, as my parents' liked to point out with some frequency. These big ships ambled through the Stait of Juan de Fuca, trailing gulls, moving wih a certain solemn, elephantine grace
Prevented from sprinting on deck (because the ferry is not a fun ride), I was obliged to entertain myself another way and I decided to see if I could calculate how much water was under the ferry. I didn't have any device for measuring, and because I was 7, I didn't have a metric.
No, I just decided to see if I could "think about" all the water that was under the ferry. That would be my first "measure." Having done that, I then decided to "think about" all the water that was around the ferry. My second measure. I then began casting the net of calculation across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. My conclusion: there was a lot, really a lot, of water here.
There was so much water I could feel my attempt to measure it collapse. There was too much water. It was immeasurable. And probably not because I was 7. It was just fantastically large. It was so large it exploded my attempts to "think about" it.
This was my introduction to the sublime (I realized later), which Kant describes as something that
contravene[s] the ends of our power of judgement, [and proves to be] be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be, as it were, an outrage on the imagination, and yet it is judged all the more sublime on that account.
I think our feeling for the sublime is in retreat for three reasons. The first is that we now have a GPS device in most cars that can find and guide us to any address in the continental US. If America ever seemed limitlessly large, it doesn't any more.
The second is that the American economy no longer feels like it is as expansionary as it once was. It might be the rise of China and India. It could be a number of things. But that feeling that we had at mid century, of limitless wealth, has passed.
The third is that with the meltdown of financial institutions in the last few months, capital no longer feels as sublime as it used to. (I don't doubt that it is. It just doesn't feel that way now.)
Of course, this is merely the downside of a good thing. Everyone was pretty excited when we could see pictures of earth taken from a NASA spaceship. I mean, there were we all were together in a very odd ferry, perhaps for the first time unmistakably "in the same boat." There's a good chance that this revelation may sometime mean that we will be more kind to the planet and one another. Maybe.
And we might also say that while our natural, economic and financial worlds are now smaller, the internet has opened up a new domain that is limitless in ways those worlds could never be. What we lost on the one side, we made up on the other.
Still, I miss the sublime, the old fashioned kind. I loved having my "power of judgement" outstripped, my imagination outraged. It was exciting. This is anthropologist's idea of a "fun ride." Almost as much fun as running on a ferry and probably much less dangerous.
Which brings me finally to the magnificent Acura T1 ads. Have a look at this: A bullet enters a bottle and out of the debris comes a car. See the ad on YouTube here. Or have a look at this one. In the case the T1 emerges from a watery churn here. This really is magnificent. Proof that the sublime can be evoked in 30 seconds and 2 dimensions. Pretty impressive. Whether this speaks to a new yearning for the sublime, well, we shall see. Hat's off to RPA and the creative team (as below). And special tip of the hat to Nicolai Fuglsig for his part here. We have had occasion to marvel at his work before.
References
Kant, Immanuel. 1952. The Critique of Judgement. translator James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 91.
Acknowledgements
Creative Director: John Hage
Senior Art Director: Eric Goldstein
Copywriter: Grant Holland
Agency Executive Producer: Jake Epsteen
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Executive Producer: Eric Stern
Line Producer: Emma Wilcockson
Director of Photography: Barry Peterson
Agency: RPA
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Grant
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There is a lavish spot for Nip/Tuck now circulating. It can't have been shot as part of an episode. And it must have cost a bomb.
Here it is in the grainy YouTube version. Busby Berkeley meets Les Liaisons dangereuses meets Kanye West. Lavish, languid, and really pretty scary.
As a piece of meaning making, it's superb. As an ad, it's provocative. But as an act of meaning management, it's hard to read. How does it builds the brand and the show? Isn't there a looseness of reference, a certain semiotic indeterminacy? On the other hand, it is sumptuous and when was the last time we saw a piece of marketing that could claim to be sumptuous? (And when was the last time we saw eyelashes like these?) See the Nip/Tuck spot here.
A topic surely for Virginia Postrel and her blog Deep Glamour. Perhaps with Joan Kron sitting in as an attending journalist.
Season Six of Nip/Tuck starts tomorrow.
Sorry to have been away over the holidays. I am working furiously on the new manuscript. I now have thirty thousand words written and counting. More on the project soon!
See Virginia Postrel's blog here. See Joan Kron's book on plastic surgery here.
As they come off the assembly line, consumer goods might as well be lumps of coal. They are utterly inanimate, so much plastic, metal and/or fabric. 
I never had a chance to meet Immanuel Kant (wrong century), but I think I got a glimpse of him on a B.C. Ferry. 
There is a lavish spot for Nip/Tuck now circulating. It can't have been shot as part of an episode. And it must have cost a bomb. 
